My Fair Lady (1964), the much-loved cinematic realisation of George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, centres on an idealised version of a scholar’s library. Shaw also assembled a real library, one whose 1100 volumes were not entirely unlike those of Henry Higgins. In the late 1940s Shaw was aged in his nineties and struggling under the burden of Britain’s post-war taxes. He told his friend Sydney Cockerell that he was ‘out for money: HARD… for the rest of the year my name is Harpagon’. The solution was to sell his library through Sotheby’s. Shaw settled on a way to turbocharge the sale: he would enhance the marketability of his largest and rarest books by adding long, handwritten notes and inscriptions.
As Oscar Wilde had done, Shaw disparaged throughout his life the pastimes of autograph hunting and association-copy mongering. In the 1920s, the young Allen Lane approached Shaw in the street and asked for his signature. The playwright’s reply was blunt: ‘Young man, if, instead of wasting your time asking people like me to give you their autographs, you were to spend those valuable moments learning more about your own business, you would soon find that your own signature would be as much sought after as mine appears to be.’ (After that let-down, Lane lobbed his autograph book from Westminster Bridge into the Thames.) Shaw’s dire nonagenarian straits, though, caused a change of heart. In volumes such as his deluxe edition of Hamlet, published by the Cranach Press, and his facsimiles of the Shakespeare Folios, published by Methuen, Shaw added autobiographical, critical and trivial manuscript notes on the endpapers, below his book label, ‘Ex Libris Bernard Shaw’.
At the auction on 25 July 1949, the enhanced copies attracted great interest. Actress Gertrude Lawrence ran up the facsimile Folios to £163. Apart from Shaw’s additions, the First Folio volume included manuscript notes by the children’s author Edith Nesbit. Shaw explained:
Edith, the wife of my Fabian colleague Hubert Bland, began her career by writing verses for The Weekly News and being paid half a guinea a week for them. The verses were good enough to qualify her as a poetess; but she did not achieve worldly success until she took to writing fairy tales, which made her famous.
Meanwhile a craze had set in for proving that Shakespear was somebody else, and that the First Folio…is full of ciphers to that effect. This was an easy game; for as there are only 26 letters in the alphabet, and 35 [sic] plays in the volume, the titles alone, taking their letters in order, will spell the name of anyone on earth, including my own.
Edith, caught by this craze, borrowed this volume from me and stuck her bookplate into it. She then covered the opposite flyleaf with her cipher-seeking calculations, which disfigured it horribly.
This craze had curious origins. In 1893, a Detroit physician by the name of Orville Ward Owen authored a modest pamphlet that had massive reverberations. Written in a style that mimicked legal proceedings, A Celebrated Case, Bacon vs. Shakespeare argued that Francis Bacon not only authored Shakespeare’s works, but also implanted secret messages in the texts. And he left behind, so Owen claimed, an instruction manual, expressed in verse, which a future decipherer could use to read the embedded messages via a word code that employed syntactic keys. The manual told Owen to build his cipher-reading machine, the Wheel of Fortune, which was specifically calibrated to detect the hidden words in a thousand-foot-long collage of the works of Shakespeare, Bacon, Greene, Spenser, Marlowe, Robert Burton and George Peele. Thus guided, Owen embarked on a unique program of research that blended intuition, inspiration and rotation.
The doctor’s charisma, such as it was, enabled him to assemble in Detroit a circle of followers—the assistants and disciples, mostly women, who would join him in his search, help prepare his publications, and crank the handle on his Wheel. With this help, Owen extracted a text that was nothing short of revelatory: an entirely new Shakespearean history, epic in its breadth and enthralling in its drama. Issued in five volumes (a sixth was prepared but not published) between 1893 and 1895, Sir Francis Bacon’s Cipher Story had everything. A secret royal birth. A cheated royal heir. Homicide. Fratricide. Regicide.
One of Owen’s discoveries was the cue for Shakespeare studies to enter the realm of real-world adventure. It turns out that Bacon’s original manuscripts—the primeval, handwritten nucleus of ‘Shakespeare’s library’—had been placed in iron boxes and then buried at a secret location. Their whereabouts could only be revealed with a new cipher, called the King’s Move. A helpfully flexible utensil, the King’s Move cipher is read by beginning at an anchor letter before moving left, right, up or down to find the next character in the sequence. The new cipher bore immediate fruit in the form of a specific location: a castle near the junction of the Wye and the Severn. Difficult, muddy excavations followed, but to no avail; all that the dig revealed was ‘an abandoned cistern and the remains of a Roman bridge’. Owen and his adherents turned their attention to sites elsewhere in southern England, and back to the plays themselves.
Using a ‘biliteral cipher’ that divined imperceptible (and possibly imaginary) changes in typeface, Elizabeth Wells Gallup made a unique discovery in the search for Shakespeare’s missing plays: they were present all along in the printed versions, buried as codes nested inside the text. Reading those codes enabled Gallup to write down plot summaries and extracts from hitherto unknown Shakespearean texts. In 1899 she published The Bi-literal Cypher of Sir Francis Bacon. Public interest in the search for Shakespeare’s iron boxes was already intense. Gallup’s findings turned that interest into a full-blown fad.
Bestselling books were among the several dividends for Owen and Gallup. An enlarged edition of Gallup’s Bi-literal Cypher appeared in 1900, and a third edition soon after. Impervious to sceptics and detractors, she served up discovery after discovery, just as Ireland and Collier had done. After decoding the whereabouts of a cache of Shake-Bake manuscripts, she set sail for England. As we have already heard, Gallup’s search of Canonbury Tower yielded a sum total of one suggestive lintel and zero papers. A subsequent search at the ruined Gorhambury Manor was no better.
Other disappointments would follow, but Owen and his cipher-hunting team left behind a fascinating legacy. While they discovered no actual evidence of Shakespeare’s missing library, they helped turn the search into a popular pastime—the same parlour game that Edith Nesbit played in Bernard Shaw’s First Folio facsimile.
Shaw’s last-minute notes helped raise £2570 15s from the sale of his books. (The Cranach Press Hamlet, at £115, brought the fourth highest price.) He died fifteen months later.
Cryptographic, stylometric or otherwise, the field of modern Shakespearean scholarship is as schismatic as it is large. Occupying more or less entrenched positions, the factions fight passionately on multiple fronts. Despite all the drama and disputation, though, the mass of ‘Strat’ and ‘Anti-Strat’ scholarship has landed us in a good place. In their messy way, scholars have made sound progress in understanding what Shakespeare actually did in his career, and how his plays and poems came to be. Thanks to James Shapiro, Alan Nelson, Diana Price, Germaine Greer and their colleagues and competitors, we now know how confidently we can say Shakespeare was a writer who owned a writer’s library.
Close bibliographical analysis of the plays—their content, publication history and print-culture origins—reveals much about how they were made. Contemporary sources—the words of men such as Robert Greene, John Davies, Thomas Freeman and Ben Jonson—also reveal much about Shakespeare and his work. The slightly disillusioning conclusion from all the sources and debates and controversies and analysis is this: Shakespeare occupied an intermediate phase in a dramaturgical production process. In the phase immediately before him, authors and poets and dramatists wrote source texts. That phase extended years and even centuries back in time. In the phase immediately after him, editors prepared playtexts for publication. That phase, though shorter, also spanned years and in some cases decades. Shakespeare’s in-between job was to transform the source texts into topical, enjoyable, performable plays. His talent was a specialised one. He cultivated a knack for knowing what would work theatrically (evidently he spent many of his lost years in playhouses). Versifier, vitaliser, even vulgariser, he took prior content and made it sing, turning it into plays that delighted audiences and sated the popular appetite.
Sometimes working alone, sometimes in collaboration, he spotted and procured performable and entertaining content, then readied it for performance. Sidney Lee described Shakespeare’s talent as ‘a rare power of assimilating and vitalising’ the works of others. John Manningham, recorder of the ‘William the Conqueror’ episode, was an early commentator on Shakespeare’s use of sources. Twelfth Night, Manningham noted, ‘was much like the Comedy of Errors, or Menechmi in Plautus, but most like and near to that in Italian called Inganni’. As Manningham suggested, Shakespeare ranged far and wide in his search for material. English, French, Italian, Spanish and Scandinavian texts. Classical, mediaeval and contemporary. Sermons, grammars, guidebooks, treatises, dictionaries, novels, poems, chronicles and other works of history, biography, science and literature. Shakespeare picked from some sources like a magpie; others he gulped down whole, appropriating entire plots along with ready-made characters, dialogue and settings. As Australian poet and scholar Archibald Strong observed:
Shakespeare…took most of his stories and many of his characters at second-hand, where he could most easily find them, and in transforming Thomas Lodge’s pastoral romance (Rosalynde; Euphues’ Golden Legacy [1590]) into the pastoral comedy [As You Like It], he took over for the most part Lodge’s men and women, transfiguring them into the beings whom we know by the sheer Form of his genius and craftsmanship.
Not just the men and women, but also the plot and much of the exposition in As You Like It came from Lodge. Shakespeare found nearly all his principal characters in this way, from the secondhand store.
Shakespeare’s key sources have already figured in our tracing of the search for his library. Boccaccio was a favourite, both directly and via Chaucer. Shakespeare also lifted whole lines and phrases from Marlowe, his occasional collaborator. (He is probably also credited with plays that Marlowe largely wrote.) He used Plutarch for Antony and Cleopatra and other Roman plays. He used Ovid’s Fasti and Eliot’s Ortho-epia Gallica for The Rape of Lucrece; Plautus’ Menaechmi and Amphitruo for The Comedy of Errors; and John Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s ‘Of Cannibals’ for The Tempest. And he used a veritable library of other source texts.
Recent research by Dennis McCarthy and June Schlueter has shown that Shakespeare borrowed heavily from George North’s unpublished 1576 manuscript ‘A Brief Discourse of Rebellion’. North composed the work at Kirtling Hall, his family’s estate in Cambridgeshire. Shakespeare used North’s words when writing Macbeth (such as where Macbeth likens the different breeds of dogs to the various types of men), King Lear (the Fool’s prediction about Merlin’s prophecy) and parts of the history plays, including Gloucester’s opening soliloquy in Richard III, which begins with the famous line, ‘Now is the winter of our discontent’.
The first part of Cervantes’ Don Quixote was the basis for the missing play, Cardenio, thought to have been written by Shakespeare and John Fletcher. Let us savour that idea for a moment. What an amazing discovery a Shakespearean Quixote would be. Or, perhaps even better, a Shakespearean Sancho Panza! An English translation of Part I of Cervantes’ epic tale appeared in 1612. Don Quixote and Sancho encounter Cardenio, the ‘Ragged Knight’ driven mad by betrayal. His beloved Lucinda has been tricked into marrying Don Ferdinand. Thanks to Don Quixote’s intervention, all is set right: Ferdinand repents; Cardenio is cured of his madness and he reunites with Lucinda. The extent to which Shakespeare’s play adhered to the original story is unknown. Over the past three centuries, people have claimed to have found parts of the play. All such claims remain to be proven, and the delight of finding a demonstrably genuine Cardenio remains to be relished.
Shakespeare based Hamlet on an earlier play, also called Hamlet and probably written by Thomas Kyd. Kyd’s play was in turn based on a twelfth-century Danish saga by Saxo Grammaticus (printed in Latin in 1514). In the original saga, the character Hamlet was ‘Amleth’. The plot elements are strikingly familiar: Amleth’s uncle kills Amleth’s father and marries Amleth’s mother. The prince feigns madness while planning to avenge his father’s murder. Prototype versions of Ophelia, Laertes and even Rosencrantz and Guildenstern appear in the saga. From this material, and probably a 1570 French version of the same story, Kyd scripted a drama that contained nearly all of what we appreciate in the Shakespearean version, including royal adultery, the ghost, the play within a play, and Hamlet’s climactic death. Shakespeare did add a few things: the character Fortinbras, and Hamlet’s famous soliloquy, inspired by another source, Thomas Bedingfield’s translation of Cardanus Comforte.
Many different verbs have been used to describe what Shakespeare was doing. He acquired, adapted, appropriated, converted, revised, synthesised, improved, borrowed, copied, co-opted, re-used, re-worked, re-packaged, stole. Let us again remember he worked at a time when authorship, plagiarism and copyright were differently conceived.
Shakespeare’s extensive use of sources helps solve much that is mysterious about his life and work. Based on readings of the plays and poems, more than eighty occupations have been proposed for Shakespeare. He had, it seems, more careers than Barrington. What was Shakespeare doing in his ‘lost years’? He may have obtained expertise in some of the named fields, but not in all or even many of them. There must have been another way for his writings to pick up such a diverse range of expert content. Collaboration and voracious borrowing explain the breadth of his writing and the depth of his erudition.
They resolve, too, other troubling points in Shakespeare’s biography. Brokering and improving source texts explains how his crowd-pulling plays rapidly had an audience, and how he rapidly came to be known as a man of the theatre. The pillaging of sources also accounts for the early dates of several plays, and the fact that plays with confusingly similar names, plots and characters existed before Shakespeare could have written them.
Substantially freed from the need to conceive of scenarios, characters and plots, Shakespeare could focus on the writing, and the drama. People noticed what he was doing. During his lifetime he was known among his peers as a nimble vitaliser of others’ content. Late in the sixteenth century, Langbaine’s Dramatick Poets quoted Edward Ravenscroft on the origins of Titus Andronicus:
…the Play was not originally Shakespear’s, but brought by a private Author to be acted, and he only gave some Master-touches to one or two of the principal Parts or Characters: afterwards he boasts his own pains; and says, That if the Reader compare the Old Play with his Copy, he will find that none in all that Author’s Works ever receiv’d greater Alterations, or Additions; the Language not only refined, but many scenes entirely new: Besides most of the principal Characters heightened, and the Plot much encreased.
This function did not command respect. The indictments from Davies, Freeman and Greene have already been noted. In a similar vein, Henry Crosse’s Vertues Commonwealth (1603) damned ‘copper-lace gentlemen’, ‘not few of them usurers and extortioners’, who ‘grow rich’ and ‘purchase lands by adulterous plays’. ‘Crosse’ was probably a pseudonym, behind which, Nashe-Wright-Chettle style, grumpy and aggrieved men hid. The author or authors of Vertues Commonwealth used similar language to Greene’s Shake-scene passage; so similar that Shakespeare was almost certainly again the subject. Greene’s reference to usurers, for example, is repeated, as is ‘bombasting’ out ‘blank verse’. Crosse thought little of the literature produced by vitalisers:
Oh how weak and shallow much of their poetry is, for having no sooner laid the subject and ground of their matter…but over a verse or two run upon rocks and shelves, carrying their readers into a maze, now up, then down, one verse shorter than another by a foot, like an unskillful Pilot, never comes nigh the intended harbor.
Such verbalists were not of the same class as poets like Chaucer, Gower and Lydgate.
The clearest description of Shakespeare’s vitalising role, and others’ reactions to it, appeared in 1616, the year of his death. Ben Jonson published a collection of epigrams, witty verses about contemporary figures. Shakespeare was probably the subject of ‘On Poet-Ape’:
Poor Poet-Ape, that would be thought our chief,
Whose works are e’en the frippery of wit,
From brokage is become so bold a thief
As we, the robb’d, leave rage, and pity it.
At first he made low shifts, would pick and glean,
Buy the reversion of old plays, now grown
To a little wealth, and credit on the scene,
He takes up all, makes each man’s wit his own,
And told of this, he slights it. Tut, such crimes
The sluggish, gaping auditor devours;
He marks not whose ’twas first, and aftertimes
May judge it to be his, as well as ours.
Fool! as if half-eyes will not know a fleece
From locks of wool, or shreds from the whole piece.
Jonson tells a fascinating story. Poet-Ape began his theatrical career as a playbroker. Then he crossed lines of demarcation to become a reviser and repackager of others’ work, which he passed off as his own. When the original authors complained, the vitaliser slighted them, arguing theatre audiences cared nought about who wrote this or that play. Jonson, though, and other real literary men could distinguish an authentic play from an ‘adulterous’ one cobbled from fragments.
Title pages of early quartos speak of Shakespeare as a converter. The 1598 first edition of Love’s Labour’s Lost states it was ‘Newly corrected and augmented by W. Shakespere’. Editions of I Henry IV were similarly ‘Newly corrected by W. Shake-speare’. Richard III was ‘Newly augmented, by William Shakespeare’. The 1599 edition of Romeo and Juliet was ‘Newly corrected, augmented, and amended’, as was the 1609 edition. Some of this correcting and amending and augmenting must have been of earlier Shakespearean versions. But some, too, was most likely of earlier non-Shakespearean plays. The quarto title pages announce for Shakespeare a role that is not simply an authorial one.
Years after Shakespeare had done his work to prepare playtexts for performance, they were transformed into printed texts. This next stage in the literary production process was multifaceted. Editors of the plays (and probably the poems) did what editors do today: tighten syntax, enrich vocabulary, improve structure and flow, enhance rhythm and rhyme, and beautify the whole. Shakespeare’s editors—men like John Florio and Ben Jonson—were master polishers and serial neologists. The craft of Elizabethan and Jacobean editing was well developed: it employed techniques and traditions that pre-dated the birth of printing. Most or all of the work to prepare Shakespeare’s texts for publication was undertaken by people other than Shakespeare. We know this for certain because the greatest early effort of editing Shakespeare’s plays occurred after his death, during preparation of the First Folio. Many features that we see as intrinsically Shakespearean—such as his act and scene structures—were added at the editorial stage. He was not responsible for them.
When the plays appeared in print, they often included extra matter, inserted to enhance for book buyers the experience of reading and the perception of value. The long and tidy Hamlet versions we know from the second quarto and First Folio were probably not performed until at least a century after they first appeared, long enough for people to have forgotten that the reading version was much longer than the stage version. Plays on stage and plays in print served different purposes and offered different experiences for different, though overlapping, audiences.
Shakespeare’s place in the plays’ production line sheds light on the mysteriously uneven quarto texts. Modern readers are struck by the scrappiness of certain plays published in Shakespeare’s lifetime. They are simply not up to Shakespearean standards. An example is the Hamlet quarto that Halliwell stole from his future father-in-law. In place of the famous soliloquy are these forgettable lines: ‘To be or not to be. Aye, there’s the point / To die to sleep, is that all? Aye all.’ Instead of, ‘O what a rogue and peasant slave am I!’, there is the colourful, Stratfordian line, ‘Why what a dunghill idiot slave am I!’
These versions are a puzzle. Many scholars assert Shakespeare had no role in the publication of the plays because so many of the published editions are so poor. Alfred William Pollard, the man who let Thomas Wise into the British Museum, sorted all the quartos into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ editions. His results appeared in Shakespeare Folios and Quartos (1909) and Shakespeare’s Fight with the Pirates and the Problems of the Transmission of His Text (1917 and 1920). As the latter title suggests, Pollard’s theory was that the weakest versions were piracies: unauthorised texts, scribbled down in theatres or reconstructed from memory and from filched fragments of playscripts.
Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, for example, were published in multiple quarto editions. After comparing the 1603 and 1604 editions of Hamlet, and the 1597 and 1599 editions of Romeo and Juliet, Pollard designated the two pioneering quartos ‘bad’, and the subsequent ones ‘good’. This paradigm became a commonplace of Shakespeare scholarship. The best editions were those that most closely approached Shakespeare’s original writings; the plays as they were performed, or the playscripts, ‘foul papers’ or prompt books that included his annotations. The worst editions were unauthorised bootlegs—‘stolne and surreptitious copies’—more distant from Shakespeare’s pen.
The problems with the binary taxonomy are plain to see: the subjective boundary between ‘good’ and ‘bad’; the use of moral language that contains hidden judgements; and determining goodness and badness with modern criteria. Viewed in light of the production sequence, Pollard’s paradigm looks arse about. Rather than being furthest from Shakespeare, the ‘bad’ texts could be the most original, the most like the performed versions, the closest to Shakespeare’s pen. The versions we know today, especially those in the First Folio, have been subjected to post-Shakespearean editing. This would have made the plays more tidy, more literary, perhaps more sublime. It would have estranged them from their raw Shakespearean state. (Traces of the raw playscripts remain in the printed plays. Collier noticed that part of the 1600 quarto of Much Ado About Nothing gives the names of the actors Cowley and Kemp instead of their characters Verges and Dogberry.)
The resulting picture is one of gradualism and collectivism. Using whatever material he could find, Shakespeare composed topical, popular plays. Though suitable for performance, his playtexts were imperfect: syntactically jumbled, stylistically uneven, artistically mediocre; quite different from what we know as ‘Shakespeare’ today. In his lifetime, many of the plays were improved by the first editors. After his death, the mostly ‘good’ (edited) quartos, plus newly edited plays, formed the basis for most of the First Folio texts. Accepting this new paradigm requires us to drop prejudices: about Shakespeare’s literary talent and sensibility; about the phenomenon of solo genius; and about the dynamics of Elizabethan and Jacobean literary production.
The paradigm suggests a decidedly different relationship between Shakespeare and his publishers. The ‘bad’ quartos might not have been so surreptitious, so unauthorised. Shakespeare knew his way around St Paul’s Churchyard and other centres of the book trade. He could easily have dealt promiscuously with numerous publishers, including ones we would call disreputable. Sale of plays for publication could help explain much of his unexplained income, and indeed much of his involvement in the theatre per se.
The preface to the First Folio has actors John Hemmings and Henry Condell condemning earlier publishers as ‘injurious imposters’ who perpetrated ‘frauds and stealthes’. From the Wise case and other book-world trickery, we know to treat such claims with great caution. Denouncing earlier editions is a hackneyed tactic of salesmanship, a way to claim the high ground and to signal authenticity.
The sequence in which the quartos were published supports the alternative picture of pre- and post-editing versions. Scores of changes were made to Hamlet, for example, to lift it from being a ‘bad’ to a ‘good’ quarto. One of the editors knew the culture and geography of mountainless Denmark. The first quarto’s lines, ‘But look, the morn in russet mantle clad, / Walks over yonder mountain top’, become in the revised edition, ‘But look, the dawn in russet mantle clad, / Walks o’er the dew on yon high eastern hill’. The second edition also contains corrected Scandinavian names such as Polonius (Plönnies), Reynaldo (Ranald) and Yaughan (Jörgen); authentic Danish words such as Danskers and crants; and accurate details of the Danish court.
The Shakespearean production line helps explain the mystery of the Shakespeare Apocrypha. This is the set of twelve plays, not part of the current canon, but published at early dates under Shakespeare’s name, and thought by some scholars to be genuinely his. Verse texts such as The Passionate Pilgrim belong to an analogous poetical apocrypha; they are mostly not thought to be by Shakespeare, even though they were attributed to him in his lifetime. Some Shakespearean surveys also leave out works that display a markedly different style; ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’ is an example. All these apocryphal and marginal Shakespearean texts may be analogous to the raw, ‘bad’ quartos; the unedited ‘before’, just waiting to be transformed into the edited ‘after’.
There will always be a fuzzy edge to Shakespeare’s body of work. But understanding how the plays and poems were actually created takes us a long way in the Authorship Question and the library mystery. From the collaborative, phased, production-line picture, a newly sized Shakespeare emerges. He is not so small as in Diana Price’s universe, but neither is he so large as the ‘genius’ version. He is not the solo literary mastermind pictured by Victorian adulators, nor is he the disreputable clown or hayseed of recent portraits. His role is middle sized: much of the work that went into the published plays was done by prior authors, and much of it—parsing, shaping, tidying, tightening—took place after he had done his work.
In this sequential process there is no need, and indeed no room, for a secret author, aristocratic or otherwise. All that the middle stage requires is a workaday dramatist with a talent for converting prior content into performable and entertaining plays. (And one with the nerve to keep doing it when prior writers complained.) The size and shape of that person fits Shakespeare very well. He was not a detached, meticulous, uber-literary author. He was a practically talented, commercial man, in tune with audiences. He seems to have cared little about how perfectly he appeared in print, and how the world credited him for his work. He was more interested in becoming a wealthy burgher in a provincial town.
This is all a bit disappointing for the heretics. The unglamorous role of adapting prior content is not what they have in mind for their candidates, who are imagined as secret virtuosos writing inspired, immutable plays and poems from scratch. Compared to secret Neville and secret Oxford and secret Bacon, William Shakespeare is much more likely to have pillaged earlier work. Why would an aristocrat bother to construct an elaborate secret authorial enterprise, and then do so merely by adapting earlier content? Shakespeare’s missing library was a boon for heretics like Diana Price and Brenda James. It underpins much of their reasoning. Shakespeare’s library of sources, though, is the heretics’ downfall. Candidates like Neville are non-solutions to a non-problem.
Nor was there a principal ‘secret author’ who provided Shakespeare with input to be vitalised. Most of the sources have been identified, as have most of their authors. As we have seen, the range of input was remarkably wide: classics, historical works, Italian novels, early poetry, recent plays. Only one scrap of hope is left for the unorthodox camp. Though aristocrats could not write for money and would rather not be connected to the theatre, they certainly did write; mostly poetry but also playscripts. For a small proportion of the Shakespearean œuvre, there is room for a jotting, dabbling aristocrat to have supplied secret literary input into the production process. If Shakespeare sourced some of his material in this manner, evidence may have been left behind; evidence that could explain the more credible hints and trails so convincing to Baconians, Oxfordians and others that their candidate was the ‘real Shakespeare’.
I hoped this crack of unorthodox light would be enough for me to stay friends with the Nevillians, even though we were heading inexorably towards a critical disagreement. I was certain a silent aristocrat was not responsible for most or all of the œuvre. This is clear from the breadth of Shakespeare’s sources, and from how they were used. Even if the heretics were to find an inscription on an early Shakespeare quarto that read, in the hand of Neville, Marlowe, Oxford, Bacon or Queen Elizabeth, ‘I wrote this’, that would not cede the whole œuvre to the inscriber.
Diana Price’s picture of Shakespeare as a provincial dunce doesn’t square with his astuteness. He came down to London to make his living, and he made a Stratford fortune. Agile and versatile in business, he was nobody’s fool. The evidence about Shakespeare’s portfolio of profitable projects accords precisely with what we know about the early modern book world. That world was at least as complex and entrepreneurial as the domain of Barrington’s publishers. Elizabethan literary tradesmen sought income wherever they could find it: writing plays for performance; working as actors; investing as sharers in theatrical companies; and selling texts for publication. They also did whatever they could ‘on the side’. In Shakespeare’s case, he invested in theatres and other real estate, and lent money at interest. Many of Shakespeare’s peers lived in poverty: the historian and martyrologist John Foxe nearly starved to death in St Paul’s Churchyard; theologian Richard Hooker’s children were ‘beggars’; Thomases Nashe and Dekker were locked up in debtors’ prison; Michael Drayton died broke. Examples like these, and Shakespeare’s own humble, dungheaped origins, provided ample motivation for him to seek wealth and worldly comfort.
Documentary evidence supports the sequential, production-line picture of Shakespeare’s work. He was certainly involved in the theatre. He was certainly implicated in the sourcing of plays, and in their production and performance. Title-page evidence, and the comments of his contemporaries, show him incrementally improving texts. Several Shakespeare plays were published anonymously before they appeared under his name; that pattern is hardly congruent with a covert enterprise in which ‘Shakespeare’ was a pseudonym. If anything, the pattern of publication indicates William Shakespeare himself was the anonymous author, first concealed and then revealed.
The mystery of Shakespearean authorship boils down to a question of scale. How big a part did Shakespeare play in converting early content into the plays we know today? To what extent were subsequent editors responsible for elevating and even inflating his œuvre? We will return to these questions in the discussion of the First Folio and Ben Jonson’s library.
In the computer era, Shakespeare authorship studies embraced techniques even more analytical and numerical than those of Diana Price. The diverse field of ‘stylometry’ successfully transported a toolbox of practical math into English Literature departments. The field involves looking for statistical patterns in word use, vocabulary, grammar, sentence construction and punctuation. Metaphors, similes, neologisms, hendiadys and hapax legomena are mainstays of the stylometrist’s kit. The use of stylometry in authorship studies is based on a simple hypothesis: every author leaves behind a unique linguistic signature that can be detected quantitatively, then used to match works or parts thereof to that author.
Scores if not hundreds of slogging scholars are now testing that hypothesis on Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean texts. Despite its popularity, though, stylometry can never be definitive for the reasons given in relation to the language fallacy and ‘Shakespeare’s dictionary’: fashions in style and idiom; the possibility of an author experimenting with style; and the possibility of an author deliberately aping the style of another. Those objections apply regardless of how Shakespeare worked.
Over and above those objections, the ‘inbetweener’ Shakespeare presents intractable difficulties. The rich stylistic variation in Shakespeare’s plays and poems poses a fundamental question: to what extent is the variation due to different source authors further up the production line, and different editors further down? The variance in Shakespeare’s œuvre is wider than the differences between him and nearby writers. How, then, are we to tell, just from counting linguistic indicators, where his œuvre ends and another’s begins? A common editor may have applied similar styles, grammar and punctuation to the work of multiple authors. The presence of collaborators poses a similar problem. If Shakespeare collaborated with and borrowed liberally from Marlowe, for example, how can stylometry separate their works? (Evidently it cannot: a major statistical study by the physicist Thomas Mendenhall analysed word length in the writings of Shakespeare, Bacon and their contemporaries. He found an exact match between the works of Shakespeare and Marlowe.)
Some Shakespearean poems and plays are stylistic misfits. ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’ has already been outed as one of these. Other blatant outliers include Timon of Athens—seldom performed, not well known, certainly not popular. The Shakespearean production process, in which there were multiple sources and multiple hands at work, helps explain these misfits in particular and the variability of the texts in general. Viewed through this kaleidoscopic lens, Shakespeare the adapter becomes many men in one.
Apart from cruelling the pitch for statistical analysis, the ‘inbetweener’ picture is a disaster for stylometry’s evil cousin, cryptography. The crooked backbone of anti-Stratfordian scholarship, the search for codes and secret messages suffers from chronic ailments. As Shaw noted, with enough letters and enough methodological leeway, any combination of words—every name, every anagram, every riddle, every confession—can be found in any text. Once you have the whole alphabet, you can make a text say anything. The problem of intention is another impairment for the code hunters. If a concealed message is found, like ‘Bacon wrote this’, it could be any one of a number of things: a decoy, a prank, an accident, or perhaps a gift from another author experiencing a moment of existential crisis. Decipherment cannot get us far without corroborative, non-cipher evidence.
Cryptographers face such difficulties routinely, but the Shakespearean production line is the cipher-hunters’ endgame. If the texts reflect multiple sources as well as multiple editors working separately from Shakespeare, then who in this mix is making sure the secret messages are getting through? Editing and print production processes were subject to their own forms of chaos. Frequent changes were made to texts, even within a single impression. The remaining First Folio copies, for example, display much textual variety due to the resetting of type during printing. For the purposes of cipher-hunting, this variety is a wicked dilemma. Which is the ‘true’, decipherable text? Shambolic printeries and haphazard print production would ensure that any embedded codes became irretrievably garbled; like William Burroughs’ heroin-fuelled cut-up technique, without anyone making sense of the shuffling.
The last resort for cipher-hunters is a spectacularly extreme position: the differences among the First Folio copies are themselves a deliberate part of an uber-cipher, meant to be read four or five dimensionally across and between different copies, lines, plays, fonts and even, as Owen claimed, between the writings of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. That level of secret complexity—a pan-dimensional googolplex of hidden messages—would paralyse even the most sophisticated and meticulous printery, and is beyond unlikely.
For Shakespeare studies and the search for his library, cipher-hunting was a massive methodological sidetrack. Stylometry, as applied to the Authorship Question, is probably another.
Evidence from non-Shakespearean libraries proves that non-Shakespearean authorship of the poems and plays was not an ‘open secret’. And Shakespeare’s own library of sources proves that there was never a secret author at all. In the Shakespearean production process, there is no need for a secret author, and nor is there room for one. We have identified the ‘author’ who reliably fed texts to Shakespeare. That author is the library itself, and the Authorship Question is in large part its own solution.
Over the past quarter-century, competition between the Stratfordian mainstream and the anti-Stratfordian heretics has dominated Shakespeare scholarship. Ostensibly and rhetorically, the camps remain polarised; a quick look at any online authorship forum will show how vehement and nasty the debate can be. Something interesting, though, is happening inside the roiling eco-system of Shakespeare studies. Though neither group would acknowledge any kind of momentum towards convergence, nor agree they might ever meet at some kind of middle ground, the camps have been inching towards this ‘inbetweener’ view. That landing point is not too far, for example, from Price’s Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography, and nor is it entirely alien to Jonathan Bate’s orthodox The Genius of Shakespeare (1997). Years, perhaps decades, will pass before the more rational partisans on both sides notice how much their principal disagreements have withered.
Where, then, have we got to in our search? We seem to be back on track. There is a prospect, albeit mostly a theoretical one, that the orthodox and unorthodox camps might one day bury their hatchets. We can say with confidence that Shakespeare had a hand in the plays and poems that bear his name. He was, at least in a limited sense, a bookman. In other words, Shakespeare wasn’t Barrington. He would have owned copies of at least some of his many source books, which were so very important as suppliers of content. He would have owned manuscripts and papers, as well as finished copies of his books. In other words, he would have owned a library. The final phase of our search is concerned with the question: what kind of library?